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Size of the swap partition
Authored by: aramis on Aug 09, '04 02:00:02PM

My understanding of the VM Size is that it includes all shared libraries as well as any memory mapped IO.

Even though a shared library is only loaded into physical memory once (physical being either chips or in swap files), each process gets its own virtual copy of the library mapped into its own space. If 20 processes all load the same 1MB shared library, then the total VM size for all those processes will go up by 20MB. The actual physical memory you use (chips plus swap) will only go up by 1MB, though.

Likewise, if you have a 500MB file memory mapped, the VM size goes up by 500MB, but the actual physical memory goes up by zero since the file is still stored on disk and not actually loaded into memory (not counting disk cache, which is a whole different story).



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Size of the swap partition
Authored by: hamarkus on Aug 09, '04 03:46:03PM

Thanks for the info, I always get nervous when the VM size reaches twice the free disk space...



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